Infoedge and Delhi’s Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) have signed a public private partnership to fund research on cyber-security. The partnership entails research on ‘Identifying Fake Content in Online Consumer Driven Social Systems’ to be conducted by a PhD student at IIIT. This is a part of the Prime Minister’s Fellowship Scheme for Doctoral Research. The research is being supervised by Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, associate professor, and founder of the cybersecurity centre at the college.

Hitesh Oberoi, managing director at Infoedge, told ET that the aim of the research was “to empirically characterize, measure and automatically identify the fake content/transactions/entities on these platforms.” He added, “Cybercrime is no more an issue which can be solved in silos. We strongly believe that some of the recommendation of the research can be applied to other social systems or platforms across the globe to safeguard vital data.”

Combating fake news

In June, we reported about a new study conducted by IIT Delhi. The study suggested that it may be effective to combat the phenomenon of fake news by building decentralized models to identify fake information and counter it with true information and facts.

In the same month, Google partnered with three firms (BoomLive and Internews, and news analytics firm dataLEADS) to train Indian journalists to fact-check news. It would train 8,000 journalists in English and six Indian languages. Facebook also rolled out a feature to show more information on publishers and articles, and signed a partnership with ACJ, Chennai under its Facebook Journalism Project. WhatsApp ran ads on how to spot fake news and added a “forwarded” label to forwarded messages.